The NAACP is not done
By Susan Seligson
... Cornell William Brooks seven months into his tenure as the new president of the NAACP ... was leading a weeklong Journey for Justice across Missouri, protesting the police shooting in August 2014 of Michael Brown, an unarmed African American teenager, in Ferguson. For most of the march, Brooks had been heartened by the hospitality of the local people, some of whom offered donuts, coffee, even shoes. But in Rosebud, things changed: the group was heckled with the N-word, and ski-masked thugs called death threats from passing cars. One heckler wore a Klan-like mask, and others planted confederate flags, along with the roadside display of fried chicken and watermelon ...
“We see in higher education that we are at our best when we are our most diverse—women, African Americans, Latinos, Jews, everyone,” says Brooks, a former student of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel ...
... In the early 1900s, the NAACP launched its legal battle to end segregation—then upheld by the US Supreme Court—under the leadership of civil rights lawyer Charles Hamilton Houston, who was dean of Howard University Law School and whose protégé was future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. A string of victories followed, including the court-ordered desegregation of the University of Maryland Law School in 1936, the striking down of racially restrictive covenants on home sales in 1948, and the NAACP’s greatest victory, the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, in which the nation’s highest court ruled that segregation in public schools violated the 14th Amendment. Today, NAACP lawyers are juggling civil actions against racial discrimination in employment, housing, criminal justice, voting rights, and more than a half century after the Brown decision, education ...
With an annual budget of $33 million, a staff of 100, an army of lawyers and researchers, and 2,000 state, city, college, high school, and even prison-based chapters, the NAACP is fueled largely by membership dues of $30 or less, individual donors, and so-called corporate “partners,” which in the last 30 years have included McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Comcast, Time Warner, Wal-Mart, and Exxon. The organization works with not just African American organizations such as the Urban League, but with the Anti-Defamation League and the League of Women Voters ...
http://www.bu.edu/bostonia/summer15/the-naacp-is-not-done/